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This chapter discusses issues concerning the interface between scientific knowledge and legislation for animal rights. It reviews available and up-to-date scientific evidence for awareness of self, theory of mind, complex memory, planning actions, complex communication, and intelligence in animals. The chapter considers brain size in relation to cognitive ability and social behaviour, and mentions that even smaller brains can process information very efficiently. Based on the anomalies in animal intelligence, it cautions us against ranking species according to performance on a single task or on a single set of criteria, and against attributing higher value to one set of characteristics than another.

Whenever reporting on the cognitive abilities of animals to lay audiences, one is regularly confronted with the question of whether one is suggesting that animals are, in fact, intelligent. This chapter presents an interdisciplinary consensual overview of intelligence as a behavioral disposition displayed by some animals, humans included. Using more scientific methods, scholars have been interested in interspecific differences such as whether dolphins are more cognitively capable than monkeys. However, the design of a universal test of animal intelligence has turned out to be difficult. Humans' singular ability to form multifarious concepts is considered an essential element of our intellectual superiority. In addition to experiments on animal and human intelligence, this chapter also discusses concept formation, mental rotation, transitive responding, and the evolution of intelligence.

This chapter discusses the need to describe and measure the intelligence of various animals in order to use the comparative method to reconstruct cognitive evolution in humans. Especially, information on the relative intelligence of strepsirhines, New and Old World monkeys, gibbons, orangutans, gorillas, and the two species of chimpanzees is needed to cover the succession of early ancestors of humans that must have existed. It sounds straightforward, put like that, but it is not.

Communication, social cognition, and the ability to solve problems are generally considered hallmarks of animal intelligence. The seemingly routine navigational behavior of birds, reflected in their ability to return to remote goal locations even when displaced to distant, unfamiliar places, seems to suggest a similarly remarkable ability. Why, then, is navigation only rarely discussed together with more traditional examples of intelligence? Two factors have nurtured this neglect: navigation can be understood as a purely computational process through which a simple algorithm can lead to goal-directed behavior, and there is uncertainty about whether the underlying neural organization of navigation has the same quality of a freely associating, distributed network, which would characterize mammalian prefrontal cortex and possibly the avian nidopallium. However, the experimental demonstration that the hippocampus is central for homing pigeons to carry out memory-based, corrective reorientation following a navigational error, and the occurrence of hippocampal path cells, which display prospective-like response properties suggesting their participation in representing future navigational outcomes, combine to show that at least hippocampal-dependent aspects of navigation rise to the level of traditional examples of animal intelligence.

This book focuses on animal intelligence, where animals are viewed as beings with intelligence and rationality appropriate to their species. It illustrates apes' mastery of word-lexigrams and the accomplishments of Panzee, a chimpanzee reared at the Language Research Center of Georgia University. This introduction discusses intelligent behavior and the matrix of comparative psychology of behavior.

This chapter presents an overview of Schopenhauer's thought, explaining the main themes and arguments of his major works: On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason; The World as Will and Representation; Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will; and On the Basis of Morality. Schopenhauer's views on explanation, causation, animal intelligence, reason, understanding, freedom, determinism, motivation, pessimism, the metaphysics of will, and the ethics of compassion are all presented briefly and clearly.

This chapter examines the role of symbol training in facilitating remarkable cognitive performances in African grey parrots. It analyses the relationship between animal intelligence and rationality, and between standards of rationality appropriate to human and to animal behaviour. It suggests that the transition to representational use of labels parallels the transition from a self-centred orientation to recognition of others as information sources and to the rudiments of social rationality.

Natural science has succeeded in supplanting superstition and religion as explanations for countless worldly events—from eclipses and the tides to infectious diseases and the circulation of the blood. What, then, is the relevance of mentalism to the present volume, which is concerned with the intelligence of nonhuman animals? Quite simply, mentalistic accounts of animal behavior and cognition were proposed early in the history of comparative psychology by none other than Charles Darwin. This book places cognitive ethology into logical and methodological perspective and lobbies on behalf of what may be a preferable alternative to the mentalistic movement in behavioral science. The other scientific school, termed comparative cognition, counts among its growing members most of the contributors to the current volume. This introductory chapter discusses a series of central issues in the study of cognition that separate these two prominent approaches to the comparative study of human and animal intelligence.

The field of primate cognition is a fast-moving one at present. This means that any generalizations are liable to be qualified by new results, and we must expect refinements and corrections to the provisional account that we can now give of the origins of human cognition. Nevertheless, even this provisional account is an exciting one, especially as it is based on solid, behavioural evidence. This chapter first gives a succinct review of the findings of Chapters 4–11 on animal learning and intelligence. It then maps these results on to the evolutionary sequence of ancestor species that emerged from modern taxonomic analysis in Chapter 2.

It has long been hypothesized that the demands of establishing and maintaining social relationships in complex societies place strong selective pressures on cognition and intelligence. What has been less clear is whether these relationships, and the skills they require, confer any reproductive benefits, and whether such benefits vary across individuals. Over the last few years, much progress has been made in resolving some of these questions. There is now evidence from a variety of species that animals are motivated to establish close, long-term bonds with specific partners, and that these bonds enhance longevity and offspring survival. The cognitive and emotional mechanisms underlying cooperation, however, are still not understood. Most investigations with captive primates indicate that cooperation is seldom contingency-based; however, several experiments conducted under more natural conditions suggest that animals do take into account recent interactions when supporting others. Pairs with strong bonds have strongly reciprocal interactions over extended time periods. These results suggest that the apparent rarity of contingent cooperation in animals may not stem from cognitive constraints. Instead, animals may tolerate short-term inequities in favors given and received because most cooperation occurs among long-term reciprocating partners.

Tool use has been linked to intelligence; the emergence of tools in human history is thought to reflect the evolution of human intelligence. Apart from the issue of intelligence, animals using tools interest biologists because tool use is a means by which an individual can expand available resources. Exploration can lead to the fortuitous discovery of how to use an object as a tool, but it is the purposeful repetition of that sequence of actions to reach a goal that is recognized as tool use. This chapter focuses on capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) as a vehicle to discuss tool use in nonhuman primates. After providing some background on capuchins and an overview of the forms and contexts of tool use commonly observed in this genus, the chapter reviews experimental studies focusing on the number and kind of relations among object, substrate, and actions required to use an object to achieve a goal.

The question of whether nonhuman animals read minds—that is, whether they are able to attribute mental states, such as intentions, beliefs, and perceptual experiences, to others by observing their behaviors within environmental contexts—has been the subject of considerable debate for more than three decades now. On one side are those who claim that some animals are mindreaders and on the other side are those who reject such a theory. This chapter explains some of the reasons why the question of mindreading in nonhuman primates is important to cognitive science and philosophy. Animal mindreading is relevant, for example to the “Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis” or “social brain hypothesis,” an influential hypothesis about the evolution of nonhuman animal intelligence. The chapter also summarizes the history of the debate over this issue, its current state of stalemate, and what must be done to advance it.

The cognitive abilities of species outside of mammalian classes may prove useful and insightful to the study of animal intelligence. In Europe, particularly within the tradition of Gestalt psychology or in the work of zoologists somewhat influenced by the Gestalt tradition, studies of the intelligence of birds and fish (and even nonvertebrate species such as insects) have been quite common. After World War II, the Gestalt research tradition largely disappeared and the remaining followers of Gestalt psychology (concentrated in a few universities in Germany, the northeast of Italy, and Japan) concerned themselves mainly with studies of human visual perception. In this chapter, the author describes some of the work that he has carried out with his collaborators in the past 15 years on cognition in nonmammalian species (mainly the domestic chicken) and addresses issues that were largely inspired by the European Gestalt tradition, rather than by the psychology of animal learning, which has provided the typical background of most contemporary comparative psychology.

This chapter discusses the imitative behaviour of animals. Behaviour that appears intelligent can be underwritten by a notion as simple as priming. Now that this is apparent, the difficulties of studying imitation in animals must be obvious. It is not surprising that attempts to define imitation have, implicitly or explicitly, concentrated on the rather negative approach of excluding the ‘lower-order’ explanations for given data. Defining by exclusion has the risk of producing a heterogeneous category of hard-to-explain behaviour. This is perhaps why ‘imitation’ in animals now includes two very different things: copying of sounds by various birds, which is easily demonstrated, strikingly accurate, yet not obviously related to any intelligence the birds show in other spheres; and copying of novel motor skills, shown by very few animals at all.

New Caledonian crows, spiders, and robots use and can construct objects outside their own body (“tools”) to act on the outside world toward some goal. In all cases, each instance of tool making or use is different from previous ones, so that variability in the tasks' needs leads to variations in behavior. Tool use is considered by many to be one of the defining features of advanced intelligence and to have played an important role in, or at least to have been correlated with, the specific features of human evolution. The presence of a strong cultural component opens the possibility that New Caledonian crows may simply be better at advanced forms of social learning than other corvids, rather than being particularly advanced in their cognitive abilities. This chapter explores cognitive adaptations for tool-related behavior in New Caledonian crows.

This chapter presents an overview and perspectives on the efforts to understand animal behavior and animal intelligence. It also reviews some landmarks on the path to rational behaviorism. They include behaviorism, continuity, impact of computers on comparative research, super-learning and optimization, and future orientation.